Join 21c Museum Hotel St. Louis for a presentation with internationally renowned Polish artist and sound composer Monika Weiss who will present an artist talk at 21c Museum Hotel St. Louis.

The artist is known for works such as performance-based sculptures, vocal compositions, choreography of live movement, drawings, and silent film projections that collectively evoke conditions of stillness and slow transformation in response to memory and historical trauma. In her talk Monika Weiss will focus on the most recent cycle of projects inspired by the myth of Daphne and her self-transformation into a tree, including electronic and vocal composition Metamorphosis (Nirbhaya) (2021), which in a 2022 ARTnews review Tessa Solomon described as “a chorus of ghosts whose voices rise and fall in lamentation”.  The artist will discuss her current project at Laumeier Sculpture Park, Metamorphosis (Sound Sculpture) including related vocal and movement performances forthcoming on September 14th at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum (Missouri Botanical Garden) and on October 10 at Laumeier Sculpture Park.

Monika Weiss is Laumeier Sculpture Park’s 2024 Visiting Artist in Residence and Kranzberg Exhibition Artist. Her work has been exhibited and is part of public collections at major art institutions throughout the world. Born and educated in Warsaw, Poland, for the past 25 years Weiss has been based in New York City. Since 2011 the artist divides her time between her Brooklyn studio and St. Louis, where she holds a professorship at Sam Fox School at Wash U. In 2021 The Metropolitan Museum of Art premiered a 30-min. film with Monika Weiss speaking on the work of Spanish artist Francisco Goya and discussing her own interdisciplinary work. Recent publications on the artist work include a comprehensive bilingual monograph defining her oeuvre, with texts including internationally acclaimed British feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who writes:

“Mesmerizingly slow, soliciting prolonged immobility in enthralled gazing, calling for acute attention to subtle changes in the folds of cloth or movements of the draped body, in performance or filmed, provoking intense engagement with the choreography of poignant gestures of elegant hands winding and unwinding, rising and falling, with its own sonic environment that is neither music nor language, Monika Weiss’ works have long solicited our attention to historical events: forgotten, remembered, not yet mourned, or immemorial, so that we experience their condition affectively through a musically choreographed image of time: time is both her frame and medium. (The Fidelity of Memory in an Endless Lament, in “Monika Weiss-Nirbhaya”, Centre of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko, 2021)

Note: The artists’ presentation begins at 6:30pm. The event is free, but attendees should RSVP.

Location: Main Gallery on the second floor

Laumeier’s Visiting Artist in Residence Program is sponsored by 21c Museum Hotel St. Louis.

MONIKA WEISS, Metamorphosis-Przemiana (2021-). Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Poland. Photo by Szymon Wikrota